Cheap and Cheerful News

Can't be bothered with setting up C-NEWS? Weary of the expense
of reading news on-line? A suite of programs called "Suck" could
provide an answer. It is perfect for me, as I am not interested in,
nor do I have the time to follow, long-winded Netnews discussions.
Typically, most of my news reading time is spent saving articles to
MH folders, so suck cuts out the middleman (ouch!).

Suck connects to a news server, specified on the command line or
defined in the environment variable NNTPSERVER, and writes all new
articles from specified newsgroups to STDOUT. The newsgroups are
specified in the file sucknewsrc, in the format

To subscribe to a new group, simply put 0 as the last message.

I use a simple sed script - sed '/s^\./^A^A^A^A/' (where ^A is Control A) - to convert the
down-loaded data so that it can be "burst" by MH into individual
messages, and writes it to a file, which the MH command "inc" then
processes. You can of course replace this with the processing of your
choice. It would be easy to write a perl script to put the messages in
a local news spool, so that you could read them with trn, for example.
(I have a similar script for processing my messages from Cix - I will
send it to anyone interested).

Of course, reading news is all very well, but it is nice to be able to
answer back. A companion program to suck handles this. rpost reads
STDIN and writes to your NNTP server. A shell script included with
the suck distribution, called (wait for it!) blow, automates this
process by taking a list of file names and piping them to rpost.

Here are the scripts that I use to automate my news handling. Yes,
they are fairly primitive: flames to /dev/null, please.

The first, sucknews, calls getnews and postnews to do the actual work.
This is because my internet connection is made as root, so I need to
do a 'su -c' to get news for a particular user. Sucknews is called
from a dial-up script which is run at six a.m. every day by cron.

The next, getnews, gets the articles from the server, converts them
to an MMDF file format (a mail transport agent which separates mail
messages in a file by a line of four Ctrl-As), then uses the MH
program inc to split the file into its constituent messages and put
them in an MH folder called "news".

Finally, postnews looks in a subdirectory of suck - postbox - and posts
all the files found there - these should of course be in the correct
format for an article, with "Newsgroup" and "Subject" lines.

I got my copy from the August 1995 Linux Developer's Resource, by
Infomagic, from the sunsite mirror disk, so it is on sunsite and its
mirrors. The README file credits one "goldt@math.tu-berlin.de". I
know nothing more about it than this!